As the Knight News Challenge prepares to announce its fifth group of winners today, we looked back at the previous four years, in which 63 projects received nearly $22 million.
The Knight Foundation has spread that money around, including academic research, software tools, urban hyperlocal reporting and basic information needs in developing countries.
In reviewing the winners, we identified four areas of now-rapid innovation in which News Challenge projects have pushed new approaches for journalism: Crowdfunding, the hacker-journalist, data as news and citizen journalism.
And sometimes good ideas — like conveying information through interactive games — are just harder to execute than anticipated. The News Challenge funded five gamification-of-news projects with almost $1 million. There was some success, but a lot of struggle, Newton said.
Even in the difficult cases, Knight and the participants learned valuable lessons, he said. And projects that did work as planned taught other lessons and blazed important trails to where journalism is headed.
One of journalism’s most urgent needs is finding new business models and funding methods.
Newspaper advertising revenue has been nearly halved since the News Challenge was announced in 2006. Online advertising has grown, but most news sites are still disappointed by ineffective display ads and low CPMs.
The News Challenge has not funded much in this space — only a few of the first 63 projects focused on ways to fund reporting. However, the projects it did fund may be among its most effective.
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/136589/from-crowdfunding-to-data-driven-journalism-four-ways-the-knight-news-challenge-is-shaping-the-news
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